8ir H. H. Soworth — Water versus Ice. 221 



to show, is consistent only with this conclusion, a view also held 

 by Murchison. 



What, then, have we to face ? Why, the fact that at the very time 

 when these soft surface beds of Eastern England, which have set 

 the chorus of glacial geologists singing their monotonous melody, 

 were distributed, there was a widespread and tremendous dislocation 

 of the solid crust of the earth over many degrees of longitude, 

 inclusive of the area where these beds occur; a dislocation which 

 was very rapid, if not sudden and cataclysmic. About this I have 

 no doubt whatever. The conclusion seems to me absolutely un- 

 answerable if we are to accept induction as our teacher. 



If this be so it is equally certain that such a dislocation, involving 

 a tremendous downthrow of the strata far below the ocean-level 

 over the area now occupied by the southern part of the German 

 Ocean, must inevitably have been accompanied by a tremendous 

 inrush of water on a vast scale from the areas in the north and 

 north-east, where open water then existed from the seas of Scotland 

 and Northumbria, and from the Baltic and its gulfs, thus supplying 

 the very machinery which that famous and most accomplished 

 geologist, Hopkins, a great physicist and mathematician, invoked 

 hypothetically ; a postulate which was supported by Whewell, another 

 of the really great men of genius of this century, and accepted by 

 Murchison, " Fides magister mens." 



Thus do we answer those who demand whence we would derive 

 those vast waves of translation, whose competency the champions 

 of the current school have not the temerity to question. Waves 

 which would under the circumstances and conditions named literally 

 treat the foreign stones, whose portage causes so much trouble to 

 the glacialist, as a child treats its marbles, would overwhelm the 

 land, irrespective of its contour, as such waves on a smaller scale 

 have done in Japan, mixing the freight they brought from afar with 

 the loamy debris they met with en route. These waves take up with 

 their powerful and yet at times gentle hands, as we have seen done in 

 smaller areas, vast masses of solid rock or even of soft debris, and 

 move them from lower to higher levels, padding them round with 

 current bedded sands and concentric laminee ; taking up, as has 

 been done elsewhere, great masses of heterogeneous clays or rough 

 gravels, and throwing them down in heaps when the contour of the 

 country arrested their force, and in other cases, where the waters were 

 not so turbulent, passing over laminated beds with little disturbance, 

 and overlaying them with sands and clays with curved laminee and 

 layers, as may be seen iii petto after great storms ; in some cases 

 hardly disturbing the sands and gravels already on the ground, in 

 others tossing them about and mixing them with foreign stones, 

 when rushing into a great hollow like the Fens, mixing as in 

 a cauldron the various ingredients they met with, clay and stones of 

 different kinds, and then, as they spread out and spent themselves on 

 the heights above the Thames and the uplands of Warwickshire, 

 spreading a more or less continuous mantle of homogeneous 

 structure, geographically distinguished by the preponderance of 



